"Your money or your life" has been government's calling card for as long as government of the involuntary kind has existed.  Of the choice between the two — money or government — there apparently is none.  If we had no money we would be without a medium of exchange, the division of labor would collapse and civilization along with it.

As for government as it exists, its alleged necessity is drilled into our heads soon after we meet a public school teacher for the first time.  In my case, as a kid in the late Forties, our government was the soldiers who fought bad people in other countries.  It was called war, and government taxed our parents to pay for it.  In classrooms, teachers made us sing praises to the soldiers who defended us and to the government they represented.  The message was clear: It was only government that stood between us and evil people.  Clearly, government was necessary.

I and most other people from my generation didn't read War is a Racket or Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace until much later in life, after the World Wide Web made them accessible.  Nor was Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State around to clarify the meaning of government as we know it.  If war and theft are characteristic of the political class, why do we put up with it?

Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence should serve to guide us:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Accordingly, people suffer taxation and other abuses as long as they don't get out of hand.  When they do, heads tend to roll.

Over the ages government leaders caught on and have developed more sophisticated means to steal our property.  One way was withholding, a wartime emergency measure in WW II that haunts us to this day.  The idea is if you're never allowed to hold in your hands the money you've earned, you might not miss it.  Among others, free-market champion Milton Friedman had a hand in designing federal withholding that took effect in June, 1943.

The other form of theft is more subtle: Corruption of the money we use.  It is so opaque John Maynard Keynes famously said "not one man in a million" could figure it out.  Even fewer bother to try, especially in times of war.